by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

BEIJING â?? The Chinese people have been making daring demands for change ahead of the Tuesday start of the National People's Congress even though it is largely derided as Communist choreographed theater.

Among the calls for change issued by individual petitioners and interest groups: gay marriage. human rights. More than one child. No more labor camps. Clean air, water and soil. Justice for the Tiananmen dead. Safer food and higher wages, too.

The demands voiced in the past week are unlikely to be met or in most cases even mentioned officially during the roughly 10-day session of the congress.

Critics deride the annual sessions as theater since China's ruling Communist Party leadership still pulls all the strings. Yet global and domestic interest in this spring's show remains high as China completes a once-a-decade leadership transition.

And if anything, the show may reveal what sort of regime now runs the world's second-largest economy.

Party and army boss Xi Jinping, 59, installed last November, will assume his third and least important title when he becomes state president. Under party guidance, the NPC will also appoint a new premier, top judge and chief procurator, plus Cabinet posts. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the nation's main advisory framework, opened Sunday.

Many Chinese strive to get their issues raised and discussed at these two sessions, the annual highlight of the still-secretive world of Chinese politics. Among them are more than 100 prominent Chinese academics and intellectuals asking Beijing to finally ratify a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Beijing signed in 1998.

"We fear that due to the lack of nurturing of human rights and absence of fundamental reverence and assurances for individuals' freedom, rights and dignity, if a full-scale crisis breaks out, the whole society will collapse into hatred and brutality," said the accompanying petition letter, quickly eliminated, as was the petition, from the Chinese Internet.

The request "has not the slightest hope of being successful," admitted signatory Dai Qing, an outspoken writer in Beijing. "In theory, the NPC is China's highest organ of state power, but in practice, it's just a rubber stamp" for the Communist Party, she said.

"As intellectuals, the least we can do is raise some voice on the most important issues: human rights and people's political rights," she said. "We must keep China open to the world, not only in business and financial matters, but universal values too."

The NPC is "an annual institutional opportunity for pushing reform or preventing it. There is real substance to the discussions and debates," argued Russell Moses, an independent political analyst in Beijing.

This year, "there could be a showdown, like the OK Corral, between conservatives who think that the role of the party should remain overwhelming and unfettered, and reformers who think otherwise," he said, "or it could become a damp squib."

In southern China's Guangdong province, activist Ah Qiang, 35, has been battling for gay rights for almost 10 years. Recently, he helped 100 parents of gay children draft a letter to local people's congress' deputies calling for the legalization of gay marriages in China.

Ah Qiang accepts that the concept requires time and plenty more effort to be successful.

"The government and people don't consider equal rights for gay people a serious problem. I am optimistic we could have some breakthrough in 10 years if more gay people dare to express themselves," he said.

"Compared with America, we make efforts from the grass roots, but we lack a spokesperson for our rights and to promote a law. Although we are a large population, Chinese politicians don't need to beg us for votes."